The following is a letter submitted to Excalibur during the month of November 2015. The words are the author's, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Excalibur.
Background to the hostile attitude of the Schulich School of Business towards the School of Administrative Studies
The History
The Schulich School of Business, originally the Faculty of Administrative Studies and Atkinson College, which is now dead, were part of the early academic structure of York. They were not intended to fill the same roles or to be in competition in any way.
Schulich was a stand-alone business school with a small BBA (delayed entry in third year; students took the first two years in liberal arts) and what became Canada’s largest MBA program. Schulich gradually developed a PhD program, a diverse group of specialized programs inside the MBA structure and some specialized graduate programs parallel to the MBA. The entire emphasis of the school was on graduate education; the majority of MBA students were part-time and most of the graduate programs operated year-round. The BBA was a lockstep full-time program with only one entry point in the fall, no summer courses, and primarily Ontario grade 13 graduates.
Almost all courses in the BBA were offered during the day, while the graduate programs had a mixture of day and night sections.
Atkinson College filled a very different role. It was a university in microcosm with separate departments covering all the arts and sciences and some professional programs like business and social work. All the students in its first 30 or more years of operation were part-time undergraduates. The typical Atkinson student had started work right out of high school and was now returning, sometimes only in his or her early 20s, sometimes much older, to gain a degree while working, raising a family, or preparing to do so. The students in the Department of Administrative Studies presented a profile much like the part-time MBA students in the Faculty of Administrative Studies. A few of the departments in Atkinson were able to develop some graduate programs, but for the entire history of the College, it served primarily for part-time undergraduate students who were also working. Virtually all courses were offered in the evening or on weekends.
During most of the history of Atkinson, the Department of Administrative Studies was one of the largest departments in the school, but it was still relatively small, with 20 full-time faculty members at most.
Atkinson renamed it the School of Administrative Studies sometime after 2000.
The Faculty of Administrative Studies became the Schulich School of Business after Seymour Schulich’s donation. It sought huge new funding from government and business, especially the financial services sector, and built the new building that it now occupies. The building is already too small for its needs. Although it is called the Schulich building, you should know that the government contributed a lot more money to its construction than Schulich. SSB has become well-regarded internationally and is now ranked as one of the world’s best business schools, depending on which particular ranking you read. In my opinion, the SSB deserves its good reputation for business education, and the MBA program was excellent even when I joined in 1983, long before the Schulich donation.
In 2003, Ontario ended grade 13 and created the infamous double cohort in which two years of Ontario high school students graduated in the same year. The huge influx of students seeking post-secondary education strained every post-secondary institution in Ontario, and the effect persisted for years, including problems for the labour market to absorb the much greater output of graduates starting in 2007. SSB refused to accept a large number of new undergraduate students to preserve its high-entry standards, although its BBA program was, by that time, larger than originally planned. York always wants to take large numbers of students even when the long-run funding is not guaranteed and so, it agreed to take a lot of students. Large numbers wanted business education and they were directed into SAS. To handle this huge influx into a small program, SAS went on a hiring binge and expanded to over 70 full-time faculty members and the student numbers exceeded 5,000.
The threat and the current situation
This expansion created the threat to SSB and led to the hostility, in my opinion. I was a professor at SSB from 1983 to 2004 and I do not recall any concern about SAS during that time.
Many of these new SAS students were full-time and it was clear that SAS had changed. The new faculty members, most of them untenured, were much more committed to research and they also wanted access to graduate students. They started proposing graduate programs and SSB responded negatively to every proposal. SSB professors had a standard teaching load of four three-credit courses, while the SAS teaching load was five. SSB professors could work with doctoral students, which is more research-related work, and get even more course releases, while SAS professors could not. Success, tenure, and prestige in a university depend on your research productivity, not your teaching, and access to graduate programs and students is considered essential for any professor to succeed. SSB, and particularly its dean of over 25 years, Dezsö Horváth, regarded the upstart-school as a threat and as a very low-quality operation.
The threat that SAS poses to SSB may have increased, because the SSB flagship MBA program now has much more difficulty attracting enough good students. The demographic changes in Canada have reduced the ideal target group of MBA students, while at the same time, many new programs opened due to the perverse incentive structure of university funding. In order to get enough students to cover the very heavy fixed costs of Schulich, it has been increasing the BBA program over the years. Students will generally choose SSB over SAS if they can. However, the BAS is a mainstream business program although York and SSB forbid SAS to call itself a business school. Its flexibility of entry times, year-round operation, and some different specialties like human resource management (which is an overlap with the School of HRM), disaster and emergency management, and personal financial management may draw away some students who would otherwise apply to SSB.
Human Resource Management recognized the threat from SSB, and also knows how the game is played at York. If you can get yourself named as a separate school, you get a lot more resources and power. The School of Human Resource Management was created and separated from SAS. SHRM has its own unique degrees, including a PhD just being opened, and has succeeded in differentiating itself from both SSB and SAS. SSB doesn’t have a significant presence in HRM and doesn’t want it and so, SHRM is able to follow its own path.
After the departure of SHRM, SAS now has 60 full-time faculty members, most of them tenured, perhaps 100 part-time instructors who teach a lot of the courses, and about 3,000 students, some of them part-time, some of them full-time. SHRM students take many courses in SAS and there are many students in other areas of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies who try to take SAS courses in the hopes of being able to say that they are business students. Most of the teaching is still at night because the Registrar’s Office has unilaterally declared that SAS professors are not allowed to have more than 25 per cent of their classes during the day. This probably reflects the fact that professors in the rest of the university do not like to teach at night and want to force someone else to use the space at night so that they can work more regular hours.
SAS attempts to create new programs
SAS tried to create a Master of Accounting degree. SSB demanded that the university not allow such a degree because SSB might someday want to do it. SAS tried to create a Master of Wealth Management degree, an area in which it has particular expertise and Dean of Atkinson at the time, Rhonda Lenton refused to allow Council to even discuss it because SSB was opposed. SSB even opposed the creation of an undergraduate degree in finance, although after much fighting it was finally passed by the university and currently has 720 students. The SSB finance area agreed the SAS proposal was acceptable, and Horváth ordered his own finance area not to have any further communication on the matter.
SAS created a Master of Financial Accountability degree instead of Master of Accounting. SSB opposed it in every possible way and in order to evade the SSB complaints that the faculty members spent two years creating a unique structure that didn’t actually respond to what students wanted, but which would not raise too many objections.
SAS spent almost four years fighting with SSB to get permission to offer certificates in personal financial planning and investment management. SAS is the leading school in Canada in personal financial planning, while SSB does not have the ability to offer such a program. SAS is certified to provide the core and capstone courses for the Certified Financial Planner certification. Two full-time and two part-time faculty members are fellows of the Financial Planning Standards Council in honour of their contributions to the profession in Canada. Several more full and part-time instructors are also CFPs, while SSB has no such distinction in that field. Nonetheless, in a classic dog in the manger attitude, SSB tried to prevent this certificate from being accepted by the university and delayed it for years.
The finance area of SSB was never permitted to have any say in the matter, but privately, they have no objections at all. The final compromise that allowed SAS to offer what is simply a repackaging of its existing courses in these two areas was that students in the BAS program were not allowed to take the certificates, even though they are the natural clientele for it. SSB, or perhaps I should say its dean, hoped that such a barrier would prevent the certificates from SAS also created a new area, Disaster and Emergency Management. SSB did not strongly oppose this area, because it is not part of a traditional business school. DEM has attracted a reasonable number of undergraduate students, and has successfully started an MA program and is in the process of developing and getting approval for a PhD.
SAS is not allowed to call itself a business school, although the curriculum it offers is indistinguishable from any other business school in Canada. Some courses in SSB and SAS use the same textbooks and you would be hard-pressed to show any material difference in the course outlines of most courses offered by each school.
SAS created the title of “Bachelor of Administrative Studies” for its degree many years ago. What no one could have foreseen at the time was the problem this would cause for its thousands of graduates. Business degrees were far less common when York was founded than they are today. The two most common undergraduate business degrees are the Bachelor of Business Administration (from SSB, for example) and the Bachelor of Commerce (from University of Toronto, for example). Bachelor of Management appears quite often. No one else seems to have adopted the BAS nomenclature, even though it is descriptively very accurate and I would argue is more accurate than the other degrees, since business graduates are also educated to manage in non-business settings like government and not-for-profit organizations. However, recruiters for most organizations have never heard of the BAS title and so they assume it doesn’t exist and someone claiming it is a not a business graduate. This problem has worsened in recent years with the development of technology that scans applicants’ resumes to look for keywords. The BAS gets translated as either no degree, or Bachelor of Arts, and SAS applicants are thus at an automatic disadvantage in competition with business graduates with the recognized titles. Remember, the programs are the same, only the names are different.
SAS has requested a change to a more recognized name, preferably a Bachelor of Commerce. SSB has opposed change of any sort on the grounds that it would violate the secret Schulich agreement, which is alleged to forbid York from having another business school or offering any other degree with a recognizable business name. The university entered into this secret agreement without collegial consultation with Atkinson College, despite Atkinson having created a business school with a business degree many years before the Schulich donation. Charles Dreezer, a BAS honours finance graduate, established an online petition to ask for BAS to be renamed as BCom.
He closed it for a while but recently reopened it when informed that the outgoing Dean of LAPS, Martin Singer, had decided to state that he supported the change.
Other problems in business education at York
There are other somewhat related problems in business education at York. The university has ordered SAS to split itself in two and move part of its operations to Markham when that campus is built. The university administration refuses to provide any useful information about this situation. The agreement with Markham, if there is one, is top secret and no one outside the chosen few is allowed to see it. SSB refuses to move anything to Markham because it realizes that such a split will reduce its quality and ability to work as a unit. SAS will decline further when it is split apart, and there is no guarantee that enough funding will be available to keep Markham viable. York is presently unable to attract good quality students and faces significant funding problems because enrollments are declining; a common sense projection of the Markham project suggests it will make that problem worse.
Even more ironically, although the university does not allow SAS to advertise its existence as a business school or raise money by contacting its alumni, the administration has created a third business school through the Department of Continuing Education without any consultation with SAS.
This third business school now advertises preferential treatment for its applicants over SAS students, but forces SAS to reserve places in its courses for these students in preference to SAS students, since Continuing Education has no faculty members and no expertise in business education. At this time it is not clear if Continuing Education will even transfer the fees from the students to SAS to pay for the teaching. Lenton, who is now vice-president academic and provost, claims she was unaware there was any problem. Lenton further claims that she was told Continuing Education had consulted with SAS and apparently suffers selective memory loss since she was originally Dean of Atkinson (the Dean who killed her own College; it’s purely coincidental that she was promoted to vice-president) and knew all about SAS.
In Conclusion
What you see is a natural evolution of a problem that started when the university admitted so many students into SAS and expanded the faculty complement to more than triple its base. SSB could afford to ignore SAS previously. Indeed, SSB used SAS as a proving ground for MBA applicants with bad grades. If they could get a B in a SAS course and had a good GMAT, SSB admitted them. I chaired the MBA admissions committee for two years, which is basis for this observation. Once SAS wanted a new degree name, graduate students and new programs like the BAS Honours Finance, the certificates and the Master of Financial Accountability, it posed a threat to SSB and its dean. Ironically, Horváth is a business dean who does not approve of competition.
How could this have been avoided? York’s administration should have realized the problems it created by accepting a huge influx of undergraduate business students into SAS.
Perhaps at that time the two schools could have been merged. Now, the water is so poisoned that even someone like me, who worked at SSB for 21 years, doesn’t want to be part of the elite corporate-culture of Schulich. And my colleagues, who Horváth once called the “toilet bowl of York,” want to have nothing to do with SSB. Horváth managed to convince Singer that SAS was an unethical school in all its actions and the vice-dean proceeded to tell the entire staff of the Registrar’s Office in a public meeting that SAS was a rotten operation.
It is unfortunate. SSB is unquestionably a stronger academic operation than SAS, although SSB loses money and SAS earns large amounts of money to support the rest of LAPS. The two together could have become an even more eminent business school, although no such discussion would be possible as long as Horváth is in power.
Chris Robinson, Nov. 9, 2015, not to be quoted without permission.
